In many ways, it's about where you are in any company. If you're in a business critical, mature project with massive risk controls to prevent anything from going haywire, it's going to seem slow, since you'll (for instance) end up spending 5 hours running tests, formal verification and such to ensure that you're 5 line change doesn't break the system. If, on the other hand, you're in the new Skunkworks division, trying to figure out how the competition could upend the entire market, you might get less defined, less bureaucratic work. I've seen both in some of the oldest and largest companies I've worked for, but even the Skunkworks stuff is really different from startup world. Many of those projects are filled with workplace politics about who's positioned to be promoted to Senior Vice President of New Technologies and AI and who's going to be shown the door for having wasted $50million on something that can never make it to market, or even more esoteric things that only make sense in the context of the giant organization. Most of those dynamics are external, pointed at investors and finding product-market fit at smaller places. There's also less of a built in scaling factor at smaller companies -- you definitely want to figure out how to scale the product, but it's less immediately critical, whereas in a giant company, if they figure out how to upend their own business, they could theoretically deploy nearly instantly.
Your post is excellent. Context really changes everything!
As a whole though I would say large orgs generally bring stability and stability can be boring to our brains that have evolved from thousands of years of living hand-to-mouth.
the amount of waste is unbelievable and utterly sickening. and that 50 million is just a drop in the bucket, compared to the huge waste of money and other resources worldwide, and not just in the software field.
